By Guest Contributor Frank Romano

It all began because of a small note I sent to Frank Romano, who’s teaching at Cal Poly this term. He responded by saying that my note was a beautiful reproduction of a chromolithograph from the 1800s. I hadn’t heard the term in years, and I had never written about it in a Print Tip. Lucky for me (and you), Frank’s got it covered.

Chromolithography is a method for making multi-color prints using stones or metal plates – based on the fact that oil and water do not mix.

The lithographic process is chemical, because an image is applied to a porous limestone or zinc plate with a grease-based crayon or ink. After the image is drawn onto stone, the stone is coated with a gum arabic solution and weak nitric acid, and then coated with water and inked with oil-based inks. Paper is placed on the inked image and run through a printing press to transfer the image to the paper using pressure.

Alois Senefelder discovered lithography in 1798, and it was monochromatic. Its name is based on “lithos” for stone and “graphien” for writing. It allowed images to be reproduced — anything that could be drawn on the stone would do.

Colors were later printed by drawing the area for each color on a different stone, and then printing the new color onto the paper. Each color in the image must be separately drawn onto a new stone or plate and applied to the paper one at a time. It was not unusual for 20 to 25 stones to be used on a single image. Each sheet of paper will pass through the printing press as many times as there are colors in the final print. Each print for each stone or plate had to be precisely registered, or lined up using register marks. This was not easy with manual methods.

Many of the images were embossed to add dimensionality.

Chromolithography could take months to produce. During the Victorian era, chromolithographs populated children’s and fine arts publications, as well as advertising art, in trade cards, labels, and posters. They were also used for advertisements, popular prints, and books with pictures. Many were printed to go into scrapbooks.

A famous lithographer and publisher of chromolithographs was Louis Prang, a German-born entrepreneur, based in Boston, who printed the first American Christmas card.

The firm Currier and Ives described itself as “Publishers of Cheap and Popular Prints.” At least 7,500 lithographs were published in the firm’s 72 years of operation. Artists produced two to three new images every week for 64 years (1834–1895), producing more than a million prints by hand-colored lithography, not chromolithography.

The Museum of Printing in North Andover, MA has an excellent collection of chromolithographs plus the embossing jigs. There are several stones and a litho press, as well as one stone 3 feet by 4 feet that has one color image from a multi-color print. They are planning an exhibition in the Fall of 2011. Visitwww.museumofprinting.org for details.

For more information, see Jay Last’s book, “The Color Explosion: Nineteenth-Century American Lithography.”* Hillcrest Press, 2005, and http://wn.com/Printmaking_Processes_Lithography.

*I came across a terrific 5-minute video about this book. Worth your time to see some gorgeous examples of chromolithography and listen to an interesting narration: www.huntington.org/colorexplosion/. The Huntington is in San Marino, CA. “The Color Explosion” was on exhibition there last year.

©2011 Frank Romano and Margie Dana. All rights reserved. Your comments are encouraged. You’re free to forward this email to friends and colleagues. However, no part of this column may be reprinted without permission from the author.